Sunday, October 15, 2017

I
show documentaries in my classes as often as I assign readings, and I’ve long
told my students that they can learn as much from a good documentary as they
can from a good book. This year’s GlobeDocs Film Festival, sponsored by the
Boston Globe in conjunction with HUBweek, offered abundant evidence of just how
educationally rewarding well-crafted documentaries can be. Over the past
weekend, I watched seven excellent films, all at the Brattle Theatre in Harvard
Square, with topics ranging from the worldwide refugee crisis to restorative
justice to male ballet dancers to airboating in the Everglades.

The
Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei’s latest film, Human Flow, provides a widescreen and consummately global
perspective on the current struggles of international migrants to overcome
forced displacement and settle in new lands. Covering refugees from 23
countries over one year, the movie’s scale is unmatched in addressing this
subject. Ai Weiwei’s camera steadily and intrepidly follows masses of migrants
as they trek together down muddy roads, up steep trails through mountainous
terrains, across rivers that they wade while carrying luggage and children in
their arms, and over oceans in solitary boats overflowing with passengers.

The
first half of Human Flow focuses more
on these vast streams of bodies and faces than individual stories, though the
film’s latter half does shift to consider particular narrative strands as well.
Several of the people whose stories make their way into the film still linger
powerfully in my memory: a man who fled Myanmar with other refugees and laments
being referred to as “boat people” when they’re all human beings whose futures
were destroyed by the brutality of the military junta
in their homeland; a group of young women in Gaza who express to the camera their
dream of traveling the world and then returning home; and a traumatized man
from Syria who weeps over the makeshift graves of his five family members who
drowned at sea while trying to sail to a new life in a better place.

The
final segments of the film include highly composed aerial drone footage of
sprawling temporary refugee camps and neatly organized migrant neighborhoods. The drone cameras pan across these
migrant spaces calmly and gradually, and one even descends straight down from
far overhead to land gently in a circle of people who have gathered around it.
These images suggest at once the enormity of the refugee crisis and the seeming
smallness of the 65 million individual lives currently affected, the largest number
of refugees since World War II. A former astronaut from Aleppo, Mohammad Fares,
through his own perspective on our planet from high above, summarizes the
film’s humanist global message: “We all have to share.”

Circle Up,
directed by Julie Mallozzi, is among the most profound and moving films I’ve
ever seen on the theme of forgiveness. Set in the Dorchester neighborhood of
Boston, the film tells the story of Janet Connors, whose son Joel was stabbed
to death in his apartment at age 19. Connors has since become a vocal
advocate and practitioner of restorative justice, seeking to help find
meaningful forms of redemption for those who have committed violent crimes,
including the men who killed her own son, rather than just calling for retribution
and incarcerating them through the court system. She facilitates community
“circles” to promote victim-offender dialogues as a form of individual and
communal healing; these circles of talking and listening about each other’s
tragedies are inherited from Native American peoples, whose practices are also
closely explored in the film.

The
documentary gathers much of its power from Connors’ relationship with one of
the men responsible for her son’s homicide. The man is identified in the
documentary only as “AJ,” and his face is never fully revealed on camera.
Filmed from behind in partial profile and partial shadow, he recounts the
experience of meeting Connors when she arranged to visit him in prison, mainly
so that she could share with him her own side of the tragic loss of her son. At
the time of the visit, he recalls, he was still too young to feel much in
response to what she shared. As required by law, their entire exchange was
transcribed on paper, a document to which AJ returned several years later when
he was placed in solitary confinement. Her words finally break through to him,
and he writes her a detailed letter, initiating a genuine plea for forgiveness
that changes the course of his life. After his release from prison, the two
visit Joel’s gravesite together as part of their reconciliation, an image that
I doubt will ever fully leave my mind.

I
also feel fortunate to have seen documentary portraits of two
extraordinary artists whose work I was totally unfamiliar with before watching
the films: the Brazilian ballet dancer Marcelo Gomes, and the late, celebrated Getty Images
photojournalist Chris Hondros. Anatomy of
a Male Ballet Dancer, finely directed by David Barba and James Pellerito,
presents Gomes as an effortlessly likable and professionally enduring
personality. Despite the intense physical demands of his 20-year international
career in ballet, beginning with his studies at Florida’s famed Harid
Conservatory to his present status as a principal performer with the American
Ballet Theatre, Gomes has persistently maintained a great sense of humor while
keeping his eye firmly fixed on the level horizon of his dreams.

While
the documentary focuses mostly on Gomes’ artistic and professional development
over time, his personal life and family life are also considered in the film.
He was among the first major male ballet dancers to come out as gay publicly
when he was featured on the cover of The
Advocate magazine; having been raised by a pair of gay uncles, he mentions
at one point in the movie that coming out as a teenager was no problem for him at
all, due to their example and caring influence. His relationship with his
father is also explored because at the time the film was made, his father had
still never traveled to see Gomes perform in an American Ballet Theatre
production in New York. His father was supportive of Marcelo’s decision to
pursue ballet from a young age, so having the opportunity for his father to
watch him dance on a New York stage is a wish that Gomes still hopes to fulfill
before he retires from his ballet career.

Photographer Chris Hondros, one of the most prominent photojournalists of the
past two decades, covered wars in Liberia, Iraq, and Libya, and his images
became some of the foundational touchstones of those conflicts for the general
public through news media outlets. One of his colleagues mentions that Hondros
“was there for every major world event” in recent years. He was killed at age
41 in 2011, during coverage of a violent combat situation in Libya. One of his
closest friends since childhood, the non-fiction author and filmmaker Greg
Campbell, has directed Hondros as a
deeply engrossing film that’s also a much-deserved memorial to Chris.

Several
interviewees in the documentary mention that Hondros’ pursuit of high-risk
scenarios abroad seemed to be authentically rooted in human empathy. He found
ways to re-connect with his subjects long after he had photographed them. For
instance, he sought out the young Liberian fighter at the center of what would
go on to be perhaps Hondros’ best-known image, urged the man to return to
school, and gave him the funding to help him do so, which the man later says
completely turned his life around in a positive direction. The dangers of Hondros’
career were manifold, but he continued to capture those images and cultivate
those relationships. When his mother Inge Hondros is interviewed in the film,
she recounts how Christopher’s father tried to dissuade him in his youth from
pursuing a career in photography, and she flat-out told Chris’ dad, “Zip it.”
That gave Hondros the chance to follow his true calling.

Finally,
I was quite surprised to enjoy Gladesmen:
The Last of the Sawgrass Cowboys as much as I did. I wasn’t sure before
watching the film if the topic of airboating in the Florida Everglades would
hold my interest, but director David Abel and his producing partner Andy Laub
have created a beautifully made and timely film that’s filled with entertaining
characters and important environmental issues. The backdrop of isolated south
Florida marshland, with its wide blue skies and spectacular sunsets, is itself
reason enough to see the film. But the people who inhabit it are equally
intriguing from start to finish because they’re fighting to maintain their
distinctive way of life. Congress recently passed legislation that will begin
to phase out private airboating in the Everglades; anyone who wasn’t at least
16-years-old in 1989 will no longer be permitted to operate an airboat
privately. The National Park Service sought to pass these laws for
environmental purposes. They claim that airboat trails through sawgrass are
re-routing the natural water flow in ways that harm the environment, and they
also want to eradicate hunting in the Everglades. Some gladesmen earn their
income from hunting for frogs, alligators, and other animals in the marshlands.

Lifelong
residents of the area, like the film’s key figure, Donnie Onstad, argue that
the gladesmen’s children and grandchildren should have a right to the same
idyllic upbringing and family rituals that he grew up with himself. Most of the
airboaters interviewed in the film mention how remote the territory is, and they
say that airboating is really the only way to access many locations. Others
remark, rightfully, that airboating is therefore a long-standing form of communing
peacefully with their natural environment, and a way of being at one with it.
But the most sobering comments in the film come from Professor Harold Wanless,
chair of Geological Sciences at the University of Miami, who says without
question that, due to climate change and sea-level rise, coastal areas of
southern Florida will be overtaken by the ocean within the next century,
perhaps even sooner. For that reason, and many others witnessed in these
documentaries, I felt that the films in the GlobeDocs festival speak urgently
both to our present moment and to our future.